Clam Island, an innovative gamified yield farming and NFT investment platform, successfully launched on 30 September 2021
Clam Island aims to gamify blockchain investment and bring DeFi to the masses by making the process easy, fun and effective. The platform is built on a 3D Island with in-game characters that support users through the yield farming and NFT generation process, and introduces an industry-first Play-to-Invest model, as distinct from Play-to-Earn.
The Clam Island team participated in the Filecoin Launchpad Accelerator Programs of Tachyon and presented the project in front of various Venture Capital companies on the Demo Day of the program on 28 September 2021, several days before its official public launch.
So what is Play-to-Invest?
According to Sandy Zhang, CEO of Clam Island, “in a Play-to-Earn model, you have to grind by investing time and skill to earn money. In a Play-to-Invest model like Clam Island, on a Play-to-Invest platform, you play a game to invest money, as an alternative to traditional models such as stock investing where the process is heavily reliant on boring dashboards filled with charts and numbers. This is fundamentally different from Play-to-Earn and is also much more friendly to the casual gamer interested in novel ways to invest money.”
“The GameStop short squeeze has shown that the old-world order of investing is becoming left behind as new generations of younger investors take center stage. By introducing the Play-to-Invest concept, Clam Island is firmly positioning itself as a pioneer in the investing space, with a clear plan to take DeFi into the mainstream by setting sights on the burgeoning intersection between the trillion-dollar retail investment market and the 3 billion user-strong global gaming market,” continued Sandy Zhang.
How does Clam Island work?
The delightful aesthetics and relaxing island theme of the game belies a complex and robust ecosystem that lies underneath Clam Island.
There is a yield-farming platform at its heart, where DeFi users will see a familiar interface inside the Clam Island Bank. Clam Island has two native tokens – $GEM, the native reward token and the in-game currency, and $SHELL, the governance token.
However, this is just one part of the ecosystem and there are several unique twists that Clam Island has added to the typical yield farming model.
On Clam Island you are able to purchase Clams using the $GEM token, through which 80% of the used $GEM is burned to combat inflation. The purchased Clams are NFTs with billions of possible trait combinations and built-in rarity tiers, selected randomly on-chain whenever a Clam is purchased. Purchased Clam NFTs can then be used to farm for Pearl NFTs, which also have billions of possible trait combinations and built-in rarity tiers.
Both Clams and Pearls are rendered in 3D and are interactive. They also have utility in the Clam Island Bank, where they can boost your yield-farming rewards in different ways depending on the specific traits of the Clam or Pearl.
Clam NFTs can also be burned in return for $SHELL, and this is the only way that the supply of the $SHELL token can increase. In the future, $SHELL tokens can be used to vote for important decisions relating to the future of Clam Island.
“It can take some time to understand and fully appreciate Clam Island’s underlying tokenomics, but once you do, you will see that we have designed everything with sustainability in mind,” says Sandy Zhang. “We have also received very positive feedback from our community relating to the mechanics of the game and the interactive utility of the Clam and Pearl NFTs. And we have plenty more planned for Clam Island in the future.”
From conceptualization to launch
The founders of Clam Island are all seasoned yield-farmers in the DeFi space. Tired of the constant forks and lack of true innovation, an idea was born and a team of believers was formed out of the March 2021 ETHGlobal NFTHack hackathon.
Clam Island was accepted as one of 20 teams in the Summer 2021 cohort of the Tachyon Filecoin Launchpad Accelerator Program. Tachyon, of course, is the accelerator arm of Consensys, one of the largest blockchain companies in the world that is behind many well-known companies and products such as MetaMask. Through this Accelerator program, Clam Island honed its vision under the guidance of high-profile blockchain-experts, mentors, leaders and investors.
“We always knew that the ecosystem that we have designed for Clam Island is capable of so much more that just being restricted to a single game,” says Sandy Zhang. “Clam Island, for us, is a proof of concept – once we prove our Play-to-Invest model, our goal is to then becomes something like the Steam of blockchain gaming and yield-farming.”
Clam Island was launched on 30 September 2021 to high praise from the community. As at the time of writing several days following its launch, the market cap of the currently circulating supply is below $1M for the $SHELL token and about $500,000 for the $GEM token, with a total value of $6.7M locked across its yield farming pools in the Clam Island Bank.
Looking into a bright & sunny future
Clam Enterprises Ltd, the company formed behind Clam Island, is now going through a seed investment round to execute its ultimate vision of becoming a chain-agnostic and game-agnostic platform where any NFT-based game can join the ecosystem to effortlessly gain financial utility and interoperability for its in-game NFT assets. More information on this vision can be found here.
At the time of writing, ConsenSys Mesh and Protocol Labs have already committed to Clam Enterprises’s seed round. The raise is ongoing.
Links to Clam Island Website & Social Media:
Clam Island Website: https://clamisland.fi
Clam Island Telegram: https://t.me/clamisland
Clam Island Twitter: https://twitter.com/clam_island
Clam Island Medium: https://clamisland.medium.com
Clam Island Discord: https://discord.gg/YH8fHuhA
